Adjudication in the Age of Disagreement
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Fordham Law Review Volume 86 Issue 1 Article 14 2017 Adjudication in the Age of Disagreement John Fabian Witt Yale Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Courts Commons, Judges Commons, and the Jurisprudence Commons Recommended Citation John Fabian Witt, Adjudication in the Age of Disagreement, 86 Fordham L. Rev. 149 (2017). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol86/iss1/14 This Lecture is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE HANDS LECTURE ADJUDICATION IN THE AGE OF DISAGREEMENT John Fabian Witt* It is a great honor to deliver the Hands Lecture on the 125th anniversary of this great court.1 I would like to thank Judge Wesley for inviting me to be here; Chief Judge Katzmann for presiding over these wonderful 125th anniversary events; and all my mentors, teachers, and friends on the court, on the federal district courts, and at the bar that practices in the Second Circuit. Let me cut to the chase. This has been a great court for a very long time— it has been a court of superlatives. I plan in fact to make this greatness the core of my remarks here today. And what else could I do in a lecture delivered here in the court’s own beautiful courtroom? And on its birthday no less! It would be churlish to pursue any other course. This is the court of the most influential lower federal court judge of the twentieth century, Billings Learned Hand, who served on the Second Circuit from 1924 to 1961 and on the Southern District of New York bench before that.2 It is the court of Hand’s respected cousin, Augustus, who served from 1927 to 1954.3 For decades now, no lecture like this has been complete without the recitation of the Circuit’s basic catechism: “[Q]uote Learned, but follow Gus.”4 Together, the Hands made the Second Circuit first among its peers. This is a court of extraordinary characters. The iconoclast Jerome Frank graced this bench, almost certainly the only federal judge in history to publish a controversial Freudian interpretation of law before his confirmation.5 And * Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Many thanks to Thomas Scott-Railton for superb research assistance and intellectual inspiration. 1. This lecture was given on October 26, 2016, at the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse as part of the Second Circuit’s 125th Anniversary celebration. For a discussion of the anniversary, see Robert A. Katzmann, One Hundred Twenty-Five Years of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: A Brief Project Overview, 85 FORDHAM L. REV. 1 (2016). 2. Hand, Learned, FED. JUD. CTR., https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/hand-learned [https://perma.cc/36AH-EM83] (last visited Sept. 21, 2017). 3. Hand, Augustus Noble, FED. JUD. CTR., https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/hand- augustus-noble [https://perma.cc/U637-XXKX] (last visited Sept. 21, 2017). 4. GERALD GUNTHER, LEARNED HAND: THE MAN AND THE JUDGE 558 (2011). 5. See generally JEROME N. FRANK, LAW AND THE MODERN MIND (1930). 149 150 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86 this is the court of Henry Friendly, who sat on the bench from 1959 to 1986,6 for whom the great Thurgood Marshall coined a twist on the famous homily about the Hands, “Quote Friendly, and follow Friendly!”7 Justice Marshall, who himself sat on the Second Circuit, asserted that this court “stands out among all other courts of appeals” because of its “unrivaled reputation for judicial craftsmanship.”8 One observer has asserted that the Second Circuit is simply “a great appellate court” of the United States, claiming pointedly (and perhaps impolitically) that it sits “not in Washington but in New York.”9 Some well-informed lawyers went so far as to say that the Second Circuit under Learned Hand was “the strongest tribunal in the English-speaking world.”10 Overkill? A little much, I am sure you will agree. Insiders here today will note that I am skipping over at least one discordant note in the storied Second Circuit of the interwar and midcentury years. I promised the honorable conveners of today’s lecture that I would not even so much as mention Judge Martin Manton, the senior judge of the Second Circuit in the 1920s and 1930s.11 I will not dwell on Judge Manton, nor on the errors that led to his bribery conviction,12 nor even on the ongoing mystery of Manton’s old portrait and whether some district judge still retains it, apparently as a reminder of the fallibility of those who sit in review of district court decisions. These matters would be inappropriate for an occasion such as this. But in truth, it is easy to pass over Manton. To praise this court is to take a path well worn for over a century now by observers who knew what they were talking about. And that raises an interesting question. What explains all the praise for this court? What makes a tribunal strong? What role do judges play in our system of governance such that the Second Circuit’s particular virtues hold such a distinctive place in the tradition of adjudication? In the time I have here with you today I would like to offer the beginnings of an answer. It does not lie in the distance between the court’s traditions and Manton’s conduct. That would be too easy. At base, I think the answer lies in something far more subtle and interesting: the relationship between a 6. See Friendly, Henry Jacob, FED. JUD. CTR., https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/ friendly-henry-jacob [https://perma.cc/9CRD-NRGM] (last visited Sept. 21, 2017). 7. Pierre N. Leval, Remarks on Henry Friendly: On the Award of the Henry Friendly Medal to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 15 GREEN BAG 2D 257, 259 (2012) (quoting Justice Thurgood Marshall, In Memoriam: Honorable Henry J. Friendly, Remarks at the Extraordinary Session of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (June 9, 1986), in 805 F.2d LXXXI, LXXXVIII (1986)). 8. Thurgood Marshall, Introductory Remarks: Celebrating the Second Circuit Centennial, 65 ST. JOHN’S L. REV. 645, 645 (1991). 9. Philip B. Kurland, Jerome N. Frank: Some Reflections and Recollections of a Law Clerk, 24 U. CHI. L. REV. 661, 661 (1957). 10. Edward McWhinney, A Legal Realist and a Humanist—Cross-Currents in the Legal Philosophy of Judge Jerome Frank, 33 IND. L.J. 111, 115 (1957) (reviewing JUDGE JEROME FRANK & BARABARA FRANK, NOT GUILTY (1957)). 11. See JEFFREY B. MORRIS, FEDERAL JUSTICE IN THE SECOND CIRCUIT 131 (1987). 12. See id. 2017] 2016 HANDS LECTURE 151 central tradition of the Second Circuit and one of the great questions we face as a society today. That question is how to deal with disagreement. I. LAW AND DISAGREEMENT Election years are perennial occasions for disagreement. This election year, from Brexit to the American presidential campaign, the disagreements seem more substantial than usual. For two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the scope of political disagreement shrank. Triangulation was the political watchword of the day. The end of history seemed to have arrived, or at least some thought so.13 Well, history is back. It is a signal feature of our politics today that the policy space on economic and social questions seems to be growing once again. Partisan polarization is at an all-time high.14 Criminal justice is once again a subject of intense disagreement. College campuses are as rife with dissent and turmoil as they have been in my lifetime. A new social movement has pushed into our public life a set of claims about racial justice—and critics have pushed back just as hard. The boundaries of the nation’s identity are contested in ferocious disagreements over immigration politics. And the rise of inequality has touched off a renewed debate about the distribution of wealth. Of course, disagreement is essential in a dynamic society like ours. We thrive off disagreement. It is the lifeblood of democratic politics. But it also poses risks. Which brings us back to the Second Circuit and its traditions. A society in which conflict among ideals is both a sign of health and a persistent danger requires institutions capable of channeling disagreements into constructive debate and provisional solutions. At its heart, this is what the law is. The law is a distinctive way of dealing with disagreement. The Second Circuit’s reputation lies in its embodiment of a particularly important tradition in the management of social conflict. The modern Second Circuit has its beginnings in 1891, when Congress enacted the Evarts Act and created the circuit courts of appeals.15 But a different anniversary, somewhat deeper in the past, illustrates my point. Exactly five hundred years ago, the English lawyer Thomas More published 13. See generally FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992). 14. See generally Jean M. Twenge et al., More Polarized But More Independent: Political Party Identification and Ideological Self-Categorization Among U.S. Adults, College Students, and Late Adolescents, 1970–2015, 42 PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. BULL. 1364 (2016); Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016, PEW RES. CTR. (June 22, 2016), http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/ [https://perma.cc/ZM7W-H9XM]; Political Polarization in the American Public, PEW RES.